This luxury Queensland property showcases the ultimate in integrated smart home technology
As with most things in life, seeing is believing. Experiencing is even better, which is why one Queensland-based smart home consultancy decided to take a luxury property on Noosa Hill and turn it into a working showroom.
Known as the Ingenious house — partly because it describes the property’s capabilities, but mainly because it’s the name of the consultancy (Ingenious Intelligent Integration) — it demonstrates to visitors just how far home automation and smart technology has come and how a fully integrated system can allow you to enjoy (and control) just about every aspect of your life, both indoors and out.
Control of the house (showcased on these pages) starts at the front gate, where guests are greeted with a stainless-steel keypad and a dual intercom system. Convenient access to this four-level house and atelier is by the Nidac keyless entry system, which eliminates the need to carry around a big bunch of keys.
But this is just one of a number of possible new ways to enter a home. Other options include pin numbers on keypads, mobiles or PDAs; biometric recognition; contactless smart cards; plus you can also have the ability to remotely view and control the home, open the front door via your phone to let someone in and keep an eye on your home via the PC on you.
The main house and atelier are separated by a large entertaining courtyard. A Legrand Video intercom system operates throughout the property, allowing owners to see who is at the front gate and/or open the front gate via any number of video screens placed in numerous rooms in both the main house and the atelier.
Programmable lighting throughout the house has been carefully designed to complement the architectural detail of the home, as well as allow for numerous scene settings at the touch of a button. When entering the front gate at night, stairs, soffit and courtyard lights illuminate the entrance walkways and light the way to both the main house and the atelier.
Along this visual pathway, water cascades into the Ingenious-designed lap pool, with water features from two stainless-steel water blades above-lit to create stunning scenes at night. The pool can also be fully lit or with cross beams of blue light, allowing swimming at night without disturbing the neighbours.
To finish off the swim, there is hot and cold sculptured stainless-steel shower on the pool deck.
The indoor-outdoor room alongside the pool area also contains its own programmable lighting control panel, along with a Crestron control touchscreen, which allows for control of the tuner, multi-CD player, DVD player and digital jukebox, available in the rooms around the complex.
The entrances to the main house and the atelier are reached via wide granite stairs to the central courtyard, which is where most of the entertaining is done. This courtyard contains another water feature consisting of a wall of water, which gently falls into an uplit pond and serves as a beautiful background to cocktails in the courtyard while overlooking the soothing Japanese dry river bed and pebble garden.
Again, this area showcases programmable lighting and audio and video control systems to the indoor-outdoor home cinema. Coupled with this is a wired and wireless computer network, which allows owners or guests to work away at their computers in either the central courtyard or several intimate garden courtyards situated around the property.
For more information: To learn more about the Noosa Hill house or Ingenious Intelligent Integration visit the website: www.ingenious.ru.
